The Hours We Have

chapter twenty-five

Why are we even alive? 

If anyone could answer that, I would genuinely listen because I feel like it isn't worth it. As living beings, we are stuck in this circle we cannot escape. A pattern that controls us, rather than we control it. Some call it the circle of life, which is consequently like the hands of a clock that can never leave the endless circle they tick around. 

The average human being will spend over nine-hundred thousand hours of their life working at a job, and for what? It was a hell of a life, you know? Working until our death hour. Breathing until our lungs shrivel. Loving until our heart is stolen. Fighting battles until the scars cover every inch of our skin and soul. Death is just a lack of existence, that which seems easier because to exist is to suffer. 

We simply cannot exist without money but money takes so many hours to make and so little seconds to spend. People starve without money, people are homeless with pocket change, and time is so little. Nobody cares how this life is slowly killing us. All around there are people, but there is no humanity. 

I always liked to believe that everyone held an untold story. Beneath their mask of perfection and control, they were breaking and suffering, but they have to hide it because society will cast them out. Like my brothers and I, we will never fit in with our community now. Aside from all the fake pity, people will never see us any different than the lost kids on the block. 

We were lost and we were trying to find something. 

Searching, for some purpose to this chaos. Searching, for hope in a world that doesn't seem so great. Searching, for answers to questions that hurt.

What was the meaning of family? 

I had felt so confident that I had known when my parents alive. Everything seemed perfect then. Everything seemed so easy. Now, everything was unclear. As if I was driving at a hundred miles an hour on a dark, winding road through a thunderstorm. I couldn't see through the rain with the faint headlights but I couldn't slow down either. There were no brakes, any second the car could fly from the road and crash.  

I saw other families in public, on our block, in the grocery store, and they looked happy. They didn't have shadows that haunted their eyes, they didn't have pain that marked their soul, they weren't worrying about financing the future. They were normal. 

But then again, what was normal? Was it just something we had grown so used to seeing? Or was it everyone trying to fit into the same box of fake images and nobody was really happy? I knew that there was a lot more that went unspoken with people, I knew things happened behind closed doors, but what I didn't understand was that family wasn't one singular, definitive term. 

Family wasn't just consanguinity, and family wasn't just one image. 

I was still struggling with the meaning of family. 

My brothers and I had drifted apart but we were still holding on, by the frail thread that tried to keep us together, and I feel like we had grown closer over the past few weeks. Slightly. I thought about Finley and how he had joined our little group. We were the lost ones that somehow managed to find refuge in each other, to some extent or another. 

Finley has been a blessing to us, in my opinion, because everyone seems a little happier. Julian was especially doing better with Finley around. I noticed how Mikeal would smile a little more when Finley greeted him after work. Even Roman didn't seem so uptight anymore, despite how he kept his secrets that I will find out about. I really couldn't explain why Finley still didn't like Ezra but maybe one day the two would learn to get along.